Chapter Text
It had been quite the tedious march through a forest that seemed to never end when Goro finally found himself in a clearing and saw the first signs of something other than plant life: A perfect “A” made of pink smoke floating over his head, bumping against a low-hanging branch and dissolving into nothingness.
Now, he knew that there were magicians in the world capable of tricks he had spent many nights trying to figure out unsuccessfully, but to form shapes of smoke was entirely new magic to him. Then again, he had shrunk to the mere size of his finger earlier, was probably still in that state, and even unnaturally colourful flora and strange critters had become such a common sight down here that he was no longer fazed by things he had previously deemed unreal and a trick of the mind or human naivety. (He thought back to the flock of bird-like creatures that had flown past him earlier, looking like pencils and glasses and even little trumpets, and decided that he would stop questioning the workings of this place.)
Would he want to encounter a magician in a place like this, though? Mad and defying any logic of reality? Goro didn’t like being tricked in ways he couldn’t figure out, and yet something inside him, the last bits of his childish innocence that had never truly grown up when the rest of him was forced to… they were reminded of many times he had seen posters advertising magicians in town on the street, people he only ever got to imagine and read about. His father would never permit attending a show, being right in that Goro had much better things to do with his time and energy than fall victim to cheap schemes designed to pull money out of people’s pockets. Still Goro had always been curious and fascinated whenever he did get a glimpse of one’s repertoire of tricks.
The opportunity to see one such magician now… it made him follow into the direction of the smoke, encountering various more letters all the while, all of them vowels. He tried puzzling them together, looking for any sort of sense in them, yet to not avail. It only made his feet move faster.
So when instead of a grand magician’s show, he only found a man on a giant mushroom that was much taller than he was, it led to him being much more disappointed than he should have been, and he crossed his arms as his eyes met that of the man’s—oh, no, that was actually once more someone his age, how curious! Goro eyed him from below the mushroom before he spoke, took note of the frown on his face, the blue hair parted and still covering one eye, the dark blue kimono falling off one shoulder as he laid languidly on top of the mushroom, elbow resting on his knee with his hand elegantly holding a pipe in place.
“Pardon my intrusion, but you are not just smoking in a forest and endangering the local fauna and flora, but also seem to be much too young to pursue an activity such as that,” he said, cocking his chin high to make up for the mushroom being so tall.
The boy did not react at first, although his frown deepened. He straightened up and then curled his legs to the side. Taking another puff of his pipe, Goro watched various vowels form from the smoke he pushed out of his mouth. A, U, O. E. He had no idea how the boy did this, given that whenever his father smoked, it was smelly and cloudy, not having any of this faint fragrance and not being shaped like vowels.
“Who are you?”
Goro blinked up at him in confusion. “Why, isn’t it quite rude to demand someone’s identity without introducing yourself first?” it slipped out of him. All he got in exchange was a curious expression, yet not a single word.
And yet despite that rude first question, the boy did not seem to be a rascal as the one with the rabbit ears had been. He looked rather elegant and refined, almost making Goro feel self-conscious, or maybe it was the query into his identity, for he slowly started to realise he had no idea who he was anymore after his turbulent arrival here and the circumstances that led to it.
He was Goro, of course, but who was he? How should other people see him?
“I would say I am my father’s son,” Goro settled on saying at last, “but you see, I lost his golden pocket watch that was most important to me, so I should hardly call myself his son anymore.”
The boy tilted his head at him, yet he did so in a way looking much more unbothered than the confusion on his face suggested. “What do you mean by that? Explain yourself.”
How rude, yet having already been prompted to question his identity, Goro could hardly not follow the query.
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid,” Goro said, “because I’m not myself, you see.”
“I don’t see,” the boy responded, frustratingly.
“If you don’t share my troubles, would you care to introduce yourself too, then?” Goro asked, keeping his voice from taking on some of his annoyance over the way the conversation had gone so far.
“Ah,” the boy said, leaning back again so he was almost out of sight, taking a drag of his pipe and blowing a vowel into the air. Another A travelled lower and lower as if it was descending a mountain. “I am neither a chrysalis, nor a butterfly. I am a caterpillar, unlike you.”
The letter approached Goro who watched it in curiosity until it hit his face and enveloped it in thick, pink smoke. It smelled woodsy and flowery, dizzyingly, enveloping his mind in a cloud as well and making him sway from side to side for a bit, feeling as if he was sleeping with his eyes open. He saw rows of caterpillars hanging from trees and mushrooms, all turning into butterflies wearing kimonos and flying towards his face, until at last the smoke completely dissolved and his mind returned to the forest slowly.
“You are not,” Goro stated.
“I am,” the boy replied.
“I have eyes,” Goro said, a bit defensive of his observations.
“Yet you do not see.”
“Please stop speaking in riddles,” Goro said, annoyed by now. “Speaking of seeing, have you seen my pocket watch? It is golden, on a string of the same material, and ticks incessantly. One can’t miss its shine or sound.”
The caterpillar boy, who Goro decided to simply call that for now, for he didn’t just claim to be one, the curled lines all over his kimono resembled one as well, frowned at him once more, and Goro already got frustrated knowing no answer would follow.
“Why?”
Why what? He had enough of this fruitless back and forth by now, and seeing how the caterpillar boy clearly had no answers for him, he turned away. “Very well. I believe you cannot help me, then.”
“Wait. Come back, I have something important to say.”
Intrigued, Goro did indeed turn back around, watching the caterpillar boy take another drag of his pipe. “I,” he said, the vowel leaving his mouth and dissolving into nothingness a moment later. “I advise you to keep your temper.”
“Is that all?” Goro could barely hold back his anger.
“No,” the boy replied, and that was all he said for a while. Goro stayed, if because he did not know where to go, or because of the slight chance the boy might finally say something helping his case, he did not know.
Finally, he put the pipe aside to approach the mushroom’s edge, sitting on it with his legs stretched out gracefully to his side and looking down at Goro. “So you think you’ve changed, is that right?”
“I’m afraid so,” Goro replied, “I’ve become someone my father would not be proud of, and on top of it all, I seem to have forgotten the proper way to recite my schoolwork! He will surely be disappointed, seeing how much of a lazy bum his son had become.”
“Your schoolwork?” The caterpillar boy tilted his head in question. “Repeat something from your studies.”
Goro crossed his hands the way he did it whenever he recited what he had learnt that week, puffing his chest up as he began speaking the words that came to his mind rather easily, after all.
“You are cold, father dearest,” the young boy said,
“To tower over them all with your height;
And yet it does make them look up to your head—
Do you think, to be like this, it is right?”
“In my youth,” the father replied to his son,
“I feared it might be bad for the heart;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, it has become almost an art.”
“You are cold,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And your words, they hurt as a blade;
Yet when people are stuck in front of closed doors—
Is it so wrong to lend them aid?”
“In my youth,” said the father, as he sharpened his knife
“I offered all care without trouble;
Once I needed their help so I could rise to the skies
I learnt all they do is take double.”
“You are cold,” said the youth, “and people have tried
To push and shove you off your throne;
Yet you always find words to make them compliant—
Pray, how do I find respect of my own?”
“In my youth,” said his father, “I took your mother as wife,
And taught her to behave and obey;
And the petrifying fear, which now dominates her life,
Is enough to really make her stay.”
“You are cold,” said the youth, “and it makes me wonder
How I can achieve to be successful like you;
If this is the way to be, I can’t help ponder—
Tell me, father dearest, why haven’t I a clue?”
“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father; “why don’t you understand!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down to—”
Goro hesitated. “I can hardly seem to remember how the rest goes.”
“It was wrong from beginning to end,” the caterpillar boy said with a frown, and that made Goro so speechless it was silent between them for several minutes.
He was just about to awkwardly excuse himself and continue his search when the other spoke up again.
“What size do you want to be?” he asked, legs uncrossing as he moved closer to the edge of the mushroom, peering down at Goro in a way that was less elegance draped in silk and more… someone trying to listen. And really, when did Goro last have anyone listen to him who wasn’t his mother? To a whole poem and more at that without interruption! Oh, this boy might be eccentric and unpleasant to be around, but wasn’t Goro just the same, actually? Maybe they were not so different after all. Maybe this strange boy, so far above him on an almost stranger mushroom, could understand.
“I want to tower over them all, I want them to shake and feel cold to the bone from fear at the sight of only my boot!” he proudly proclaimed, putting his hands into his sides and puffing up his chest.
The boy only nodded. “I see. Are you not satisfied with your current size?”
“Oh, I should be, but three inches is just a wretched height to be,” Goro lamented.
“Three inches is quite a good height indeed!” the caterpillar boy exclaimed angrily, sitting up straight (he was exactly three inches high).
“But it isn’t my size,” Goro argued. “My size, it has to be bigger than this. My father, why, he might disown me if I come home, my height the same as a pesky insect’s…”
“And what of your mother?”
Goro blinked at the boy, wondering if he had heard right. “... Pardon?”
“Your mother. What of her?”
The boy’s face was unreadable. Goro wasn’t confused for long; of course such invasive questions were fitting his nature, yet this one still caught him off-guard, despite how he had laid the foundation by talking about his father. Oh, but Goro didn’t want to reveal anything about her at all—he was much too protective of her.
He looked away, lips pressing tightly together. “My mother is resting in the sun right now, and I hope that it will be quite some time before the rainclouds wake her up again.”
The caterpillar boy leaned forward, studying him with intense scrutiny. Goro was just about to forgo his good manners and snap at him what the issue seemed to be, what about his mother, when he sat up properly again, shuffling back to gesture to the mushroom he was sitting on.
“One side will make you bigger; the other will make you smaller. Choose wisely.”
Goro stared at him incredulously. So the answer to his woes had been in front of him all along? “The mushroom is round,” he pointed to it, “how am I supposed to know which side is which?”
“How would I know? Mushrooms aren’t to my taste.”
With that, the boy leant back and crawled out of sight to the other end of the mushroom Goro couldn’t see from here. Goro sighed. He was getting used to this elusiveness, but he was still not fond of it.
Deciding that he must have tempted fate enough times today to get lucky for once, he reached out and broke off parts of both sides and bit into one, not stopping to taste what was in his mouth—ah, a little bit like rosemary, actually—before he swallowed it unceremoniously. Goro tried to imagine himself rising higher and higher, above the skies even, so high he’d be able to see his house and need only a few steps to it, at least. (He figured he could simply make himself a bit smaller with the other end once there as to not scare his mother and her poor heart.)
He expectantly watched the mushroom and grasses around him, but heaved a sigh as they grew taller before him. “I am not small,” Goro huffed, biting off a huge chunk of the other piece, chewing quickly before swallowing. “I am taller than this, strong enough to rip out the mushrooms around me, to trample on every single stalk of grass in my path,” he proclaimed loudly as he rose higher and higher, face aimed towards the sky and the tree crowns that came closer and closer. Goro ducked away just in time to avoid hitting the chirping bird’s nest with his head—at his age, he could not afford to carry young in his hair!
Soon there was nothing above him but clouds, and even those seemed to get bigger and bigger. Goro looked down at the world, at how it all looked like a doll’s house, and let out a laugh wild and free and utterly unhinged. “This is great! I am so much more powerful like this, I am tall!!!”
Below him, he could see the caterpillar boy looking up at him with an unimpressed expression, mumbling something that sounded like fascinating to his ears, but he didn’t care enough to pay him more attention than he already did. Goro lifted a leg experimentally, bringing it back down on the ground and taking a step forward. The force of that alone made the earth shake so much that he could see the trees lose some of their leaves. Goro sneered. “Yes. Yes!” he exclaimed. “Shudder in the face of my height! Bow down to your king!”
After a few minutes of doing just that, though (stomping and laughing and realising he couldn’t really get far lest he wanted to step onto rocks and trees and hurt his feet), it became quite boring to him to be so tall. And while he enjoyed the solitude up there, it didn’t do well for his sanity as there was nothing but blue sky all around him, the world he had gotten used to at his feet like a miniature of it. Spotting a castle in the distance, Goro decided to head towards there, figuring where there was royalty, someone with common sense couldn’t be far, and he brought the other piece of the mushroom to his lips again and ate just enough of it to shrink a bit, then decided against it and ate of the other piece again.
After he had experimented with shrinking and growing for a while, Goro noticed that he had almost run out of mushroom to eat, but he was at quite an enjoyable height at that moment and decided to settle for it, pocketing the remaining piece in case it would find use at some point during his journey back home. He’d have grabbed a bit more, yet both mushroom and caterpillar weren’t in sight anymore, and as much as Goro was glad to have the stranger and the dizzying smoke out of his hair, he’d have liked to have the opportunity to thank him for his advice, if for nothing else.
Ah well, his mother liked to say that you always meet people twice in life. He could only hope so for the rabbit, at least—he had something of Goro’s that was quite important, after all!
So Goro set out through the woods once more, sticking to the beaten path and the direction he remembered the castle to be in. This time, the flora wasn’t quite as obscuring, the trees open above him and letting in sunlight that the various flowers around him soaked up with smiles on their faces—literally.
“My dear boy, have a seat! You are just in time for the golden afternoon!” a tall iris called over to him with a posh voice.
He looked at his surroundings, at the primulas getting ready to play their violins, at the trumpet flowers raising their faces to the sky and taking deep breaths, at the white roses practising their singing. “I’m afraid I don’t have time for a performance,” he concluded, “I must hurry to the castle, you see.”
All at once, the flowers froze, the first notes breaking off in screeches of fiddlesticks and voice cracks.
“The castle?” the primulas exclaimed.
“The castle!” the trumpet flowers screeched.
“Oh, the castle!” the roses wailed.
“Do not go to the castle, my son, for it is much too dangerous there!” the iris leaned into his direction, crossing her petals in front of her leaf dress as if to chide him.
Goro felt irritation flare up in him. “I believe it is only fair that I get to decide my own path, isn’t it so?” he said with a perfectly measured amount of politeness in his voice. “Now if you excuse me, I cannot allow myself to be stalled, or I will be quite late to dinner.”
“It is not your path that leads there!” the iris cried after him, but Goro did not care enough about the opinions of plants to stop as he walked away with determined steps, resisting the temptation to eat the last piece of mushroom to get taller and trample on them all. Who were they to understand? An orchestra of talking flowers! Rooted in place, unlike him who was venturing into the unknown now on his own accord.
Deciding he didn’t want to run into flowers or mushrooms or caterpillars so soon once more, Goro took off into a different direction, one where the forest became dark and the birds stopped singing for the sun.
If there was anywhere both a thief and a door out of this place would hide, it would hopefully be in here.